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The race to be China’s top fintech platform: Ant vs Tencent

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As Ant Group seizes the world’s attention with its record initial public offering, which was abruptly called off by Beijing, investors and analysts are revisiting Tencent’s fintech interests, recognized as Ant’s archrival in China.

It’s somewhat complicated to do this, not least because they are sprawled across a number of Tencent properties and, unlike Ant, don’t go by a single brand or operational structure — at least, not one that is obvious to the outside world.

However, when you tease out Tencent’s fintech activity across its wider footprint — from direct operations like WeChat Pay through to its sizeable strategic investments and third-party marketplaces — you have something comparable in size to Ant, and in some services even bigger.

Hidden business

Ant refuted the comparison with Tencent or anyone else. In a reply to China’s securities regulator in September, the Jack Ma-controlled, Alibaba-backed fintech giant said it is “not comparable” to WeChat Pay, the fintech tool inside WeChat, Tencent’s flagship messenger.

“In the space of digital payments and merchant service, there are many players around the world, including Tencent’s WeChat Pay. But the payments services offered by these companies are different from our digital payments and merchant services. They are not comparable. In terms of digital finance, our way of working with and serving financial institutions, as well as our revenue model, are novel and do not have a counterpart,” the company noted in a somewhat hubristic reply.

Ant Group could raise as much as $34.5B in IPO in what would be world’s largest IPO

There’s no denying that Ant is a pioneer in expanding financial inclusion in China, where millions remain outside the formal banking system. But Tencent has played catch-up in digital finance and made major headway, especially in electronic payments.

Both companies ventured into fintech by first offering consumers a way to pay digitally, though the brands “Alipay” and “WeChat Pay” fail to reflect the breadth of services touted by the platforms today. Alipay, Ant’s flagship app, is now a comprehensive marketplace selling Ant’s in-house products and myriad third-party ones like micro-loans and insurance. The app, like WeChat Pay, also facilitates a growing list of public services, letting users see their taxes, pay utility bills, book a hospital visit and more.

Screenshots of the Alipay app. Source: iOS App Store 

Tencent, on the other hand, embeds its financial services inside the payment features of WeChat (WeChat Pay) and the giant’s other popular chat app, QQ. It has thus been historically difficult to make out how much Tencent earns from fintech, something the giant doesn’t disclose in its earnings reports. This is reflective of Tencent’s “horse racing” internal competition, in which departments and teams often rival fiercely against each other rather than actively collaborate.

Screenshots of WeChat Pay inside Tencent’s WeChat messenger

As such, we have pulled together estimates of Tencent’s fintech businesses ourselves using a mix of quarterly reports and third-party research — a mark of how un-transparent some of this really is — but it begs some interesting questions. Will (should?) Tencent at some point follow in Alibaba’s footsteps to bring its own fintech operations under one umbrella?

User number

In terms of user size, the rivals are going neck and neck.

The Alipay app recorded 711 monthly active users and 80 million monthly merchants in June. Among its 1 billion annual users, 729 million had transacted in at least one “financial service” through the platform. As in the PayPal-eBay relationship, Alipay benefits tremendously by being the default payments processor for Alibaba marketplaces like Taobao.

As of 2019, more than 800 million users and 50 million merchants used WeChat to pay monthly, a big chunk of the 1.2 billion active user base of the messenger. It’s unclear how many people tried Tencent’s other fintech products, though the firm did say about 200 million people used its wealth management service in 2019.

Revenue

Ant reported a total of 121 billion yuan or $17 billion in revenue last year, nearly doubling its sum from 2017 and putting it on par with PayPal at $17.8 billion.

In 2019, Tencent generated 101 billion yuan of revenue from its “fintech and business services. The segment mainly consisted of fintech and cloud products, industry analysts told TechCrunch. With its cloud unit finishing the year at 17 billion yuan in revenue, we can venture to estimate that Tencent’s fintech products earned roughly or no more than 84 billion yuan ($12 billion), from the period — paled by Ant’s figure, but not bad for a relative latecomer.

Jack Ma’s fintech giant Ant starts IPO process in Hong Kong and Shanghai

The sheer size of the fintech giants has made them highly attractive targets of regulation. Increasingly, Ant is downplaying its “financial” angle and billing itself as a “technology” ally for traditional institutions rather than a challenger. These days, Alipay relies less on selling proprietary financial products and bills itself as an intermediary helping state banks, wealth managers and insurers to reach customers. In return for facilitating the process, Ant charges administrative fees from transactions on the platform.

Now, let’s turn to the rivals’ four main business focuses: payments, microloans, wealth management and insurance.

Ant vs. Tencent’s fintech businesses. Sources for the figures are companies’ quarterly reports, third-party research and TechCrunch estimates.

Digital payments

In the year ended June, Alipay processed a whopping 118 trillion yuan in payment transactions in China. That’s about $17 trillion and dwarfs the $172 billion that PayPal handled in 2019.

Tencent doesn’t disclose its payments transaction volume, but data from third-party research firms offer a hint of its scale. The industry consensus is that the two collectively control over 90% of China’s trillion-dollar electronic payments market where Alipay enjoys a slight lead.

Alipay processed 55.4% of China’s third-party payments transactions in the first quarter of 2020, according to market research firm iResearch, while another researcher Analysys said the firm’s share was 48.44% in the period. In comparison, Tenpay (the brand assigned to the company-wide infrastructure that powers WeChat Pay and the less-significant QQ Wallet, yet another name to confuse people) trailed behind at 38.8%, per iResearch data, and 34% according to Analysys.

China postpones Ant’s colossal IPO after closed-door talk with Jack Ma

At the end of the day, the two services have distinct user scenarios. The fact that WeChat Pay lies inside a messenger makes it a tool for social, often small, payments, such as splitting bills and exchanging lucky money, a custom in China. Alipay, on the other hand, is associated with online shopping.

That’s changing as Tencent tries to increase its ticket size through alliances. It’s tied WeChat Pay to portfolio e-commerce companies like JD.com, Pinduoduo and Meituan — all Alibaba’s competitors.

Third-party payments were once an incredibly profitable business. Platforms used to be able to hold customer reserve funds from which they generated handsome interests. That lucrative scheme came to a stop when Chinese regulators demanded non-bank payments providers to place 100% of customer deposit funds under a centralized, interest-free account last year. What’s left for payment processors to earn are limited fees charged from merchants.

Payments still account for the bulk of Ant’s revenues — 43%, or a total of 51.9 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) in 2019, but the percentage was down from 55% in 2017, a sign of the giant’s diversifying business.

Microlending

Ant has become the go-to lender for shoppers and small businesses in a country where millions aren’t qualified for bank-issued credit cards. The firm had worked with about 100 banks, doling out 1.7 trillion yuan ($250 billion) of consumer loans and 400 billion yuan ($58 billion) of small business loans in the year ended June. That amounted to 41.9 billion yuan or 34.7% of Ant’s annual revenue.

The size of Tencent’s loan business is harder to gauge. What we do know is that Weilidai, the microloan product sold through WeChat, had issued an aggregate of 3.7 trillion yuan ($540 billion) to 28 million customers between its launch in 2015 and 2019, according to a report from WeBank, the Tencent-backed private bank that provides the WeChat-based loan.

Wealth management

As of June, Ant had 4.1 trillion yuan ($600 billion) assets under management, making it one of the world’s biggest money-market funds. Working with 170 partner asset managers, the segment brought in about 17 billion yuan or 14% of total revenue in 2019.

Tencent said its wealth management platform accumulated assets of over 600 billion yuan in 2018 and grew by 50% year-over-year in 2019. That should put its AUM in 2019 at around 900 billion yuan ($131 billion).

Insurance

Last but not least, both giants have made big pushes into consumer insurance. Besides featuring third-party plans, Alipay introduced a new way to insure customers: mutual aid. The novel scheme, which is not regulated as an insurance product in China, is free to sign up and does not charge any premium or upfront payment. Users pay small monthly fees that are pooled to pay for claims of critical illnesses.

Insurance premiums and mutual aid contributions on Ant’s platform reached 52 billion yuan, or $7.6 billion, in the year ended June. Working with about 90 partner insurers in China, the segment contributed nearly 9 billion yuan, or 7.4%, of the firm’s annual revenue. More than 570 million Alipay users participated in at least one insurance program in the year ended June.

Tencent, on the other hand, taps partners in its relatively uncharted territory. Its insurance strategy includes in-house platform WeSure that works like a middleman between insurers and consumers, and Tencent-backed Waterdrop, which provides both traditional insurances and a rival to Ant’s mutual aid product Xianghubao.

China’s Waterdrop nabs $230M for its crowdfunded, mutual aid insurance platform

In the first half of 2020, WeSure, Tencent’s main insurance operation that sells through WeChat, paid out a total of 290 million yuan ($42.4 million), it announced. The unit does not disclose its amount of premiums or revenues, but we can find clues in other figures. Twenty-five million people used WeShare services in 2019 and the average premium amount per user was over 1,000 yuan ($151). That is, WeShare generated no more than 25 billion yuan, or $3.78 billion, in premium that year because the user figure also accounts for a good number of premium-free users.

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Moving forward, it remains unclear whether Tencent will restructure its fintech operations in a more cohesive and collaborative way. As they expand, will investors and regulators demand that? And what opportunities are there for others to compete in a space dominated by two huge players?

One thing is for sure: Tencent will need to tread more carefully on regulatory issues. Ant’s achievement is a win for entrepreneurs looking to “disrupt” China’s financial sector, but its halted IPO, which is tied to regulatory issues and reportedly Jack Ma’s hubris, also sounds an alarm to contenders that policymaking in China can be capricious.

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company is setting up operations in Austin

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Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup The Boring Company is eyeing Austin for its next project based on several new job postings.

The Boring Company, which last year landed a deal to construct and operate a “people mover” for the Las Vegas Convention Center, tweeted Monday that is was hiring in Austin. Engineering, accountant and business development positions are listed on its website, the type of jobs that suggest that The Boring Company sees enough opportunity in Austin to set up more permanent operations there.

Austin is becoming a hotbed of Musk-related activity. Tesla, which Musk leads, picked in July a site near Austin for its next U.S. factory, a four to five-million-square foot $1.1 billion plant that will assemble the automaker’s futuristic Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi and the Model Y and Model 3 for sales to customers on the East Coast.

Musk described the future factory as an “ecological paradise,” with a boardwalk and bike lanes and where the public will be welcome. It’s unclear if the first customer of The Boring Company will be Tesla.

Tesla picks Austin for its next US factory to build Cybertruck, Semi truck, Model Y

The Boring Company has five product lines, all of which are centered around tunneling. The startup, which raised $120 million in new funding in summer 2019, offers the base tunnel to customers as well as those designed for use by utilities, pedestrians, freight and it’s so-called Loop service.

The company describes the Loop as an underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported via in autonomous vehicles at up to 150 miles per hour through tunnels between stations. The company says the autonomous vehicles are Tesla Model S, 3, and X. (It should be noted that while Tesla vehicles do have robust advanced driver assistance systems, they are not considered by government bodies such as the U.S. DOT as fully autonomous.)

The Loop is what Las Vegas Las Vegas Convention Center officials sprang for. Under its contract, the LVCC Loop is supposed to transport attendees through two 0.8-mile underground tunnels in Tesla vehicles, four or five at a time. Planning files reviewed by TechCrunch seem to show that the Loop system will not be able to move anywhere near the number of people LVCC wants, and that TBC agreed to.

Elon Musk’s Las Vegas Loop might only carry a fraction of the passengers it promised

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Sony prepares to enter the drone game with Airpeak

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Sony has announced that it is entering the drone market with a new brand called Airpeak, though the specifics of the drone itself are left something of a mystery. It plans to launch the project next spring.

The bare-bones announcement says only that Sony has been inspired by the “recent proliferation” of drones and the changes they have caused in both the industrial and creative sectors.

Airpeak will focus on multiple industries as well, though it has its work cut out for it if it intends to go up against DJI, which has become the first choice in the consumer UAV sector.

Sony describes the drone as being developed within “the field of AI robotics,” which, along with the aim to enable drone use where it was previously difficult to do so, suggests Sony plans to integrate a fair amount of intelligence into the drones’ systems.

Small UAVs have gotten smarter and smarter, able now to avoid obstacles, recognize other flying objects and navigate between buildings without any intervention from their human operators. But many of these capabilities are still essentially theoretical rather than widely deployed.

Beyond the name, general flavor of the project and a render of what is almost certainly a rotor, that is the sum total of what we know about Sony’s new project. Expect more to be posted to the official website in time.

DJI Mavic Mini Review

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Beyond Meat earnings miss big on declining food service and consumer demand

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Beyond Meat’s partnership with McDonald’s to develop the McPlant burger wasn’t enough to keep shares from collapsing after the company posted third-quarter earnings that fell far below analysts’ expectations.

The big miss sent shares tumbling nearly 29% in after markets closed Monday after reporting it generated $94.4 million in revenues and a loss of 28 cents per share versus the $132.8 million in revenue and 5 cents per share loss that analysts had expected.

“Our financial results reflect a quarter where for the first time since the pandemic began, we experienced the full brunt and unpredictability of COVID-19 on our net revenues and accordingly, throughout our P&L,” Beyond Meat’s president and chief executive, Ethan Brown, said in a statement. “Unlike the second quarter where record retail buying and freezer loading by consumers offset the deterioration of our foodservice business as COVID-19 stay-at-home and related measures set in, the long tail of retail stockpiling by consumers, coupled with continued challenges across the majority of our foodservice customers, led to Q3 results that were lower than we expected.”

Image Credit: Google Finance

The company reported losses of $19.3 million in the third quarter of 2020 compared to net income of $4.1 million in the year-ago period, according to a statement. Net loss per common share reached 31 cents per-share in the third quarter compared to 6 cents per-share in the year-ago-period.

Despite the poor performance, Beyond Meat is doubling down on its expansion plans by acquiring a new factory in Pennsylvania and its expansion in China and Europe. Brown also pointed to other data that suggests the business is growing.

“Even as the pandemic has created significant disruption, we continue to see strong growth in critically important metrics of household penetration, buyer rates, purchase frequency and repeat rates; our brand’s sales growth continues to outpace the category; and during the quarter we saw our year-over-year velocities rise even as we grew distribution,” he said in a statement.

Beyond Meat’s third-quarter earnings report capped a volatile day for the company that saw its share price seesaw as details of the McDonald’s plant-based burger emerged. Shares of Beyond Meat initially fell after McDonald’s announced that its new plant-based patty and chicken substitute formulation was made in-house. However, McDonald’s overstated its own role in the creation of its McPlant, which was actually developed in conjunction with Beyond Meat, according to a statement provided to CNBC. Beyond Meat shares rebounded only to fall again after the market closed due to its third-quarter earnings.

Brown stuck by McDonald’s despite the restaurant chain’s decision to leave Beyond Meat out of its initial announcement.

“Our relationship with McDonald’s is really good and really strong,” Brown said on an investor call. “I respect their decision to refer to the McPlant platform in the generic sense. We are working with them on a number of matters.”

McDonald’s to launch a McPlant vegetarian option

Beyond Meat shares rise on news that it collaborated with McDonald’s on the McPlant options

 

 

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Republicans spent millions on last-minute voting ads on Facebook

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On midnight of October 26, Facebook stopped accepting all new advertisements about “social issues, elections, or politics in the US.” The intention was to prevent Facebook from being overwhelmed by a blitz of last-minute ads that would require fact-checking, and to limit the ability of political groups to sow confusion or violence. Advertisers were not blocked from running old ads, however: Facebook’s rules meant they could continue to run already-approved political ads through to the end of Election Day, after which they were all removed. 

We already know that turnout was historically high across both Democrats and Republican voters. Though it looks as if Joe Biden will receive the highest number of votes for any presidential candidate in history, Donald Trump is on track to receive the second-highest number. Republican competitiveness in the face of such high turnout was a surprise to many, and not always reflected in polls taken before the vote itself. There are a number of possible explanations, but one major difference was a huge last-minute investment in ads that encouraged turnout by Republicans. 

What the data says

The biggest spender on Election Day was “Register to Vote Republican,” a page that is registered under the Republican National Committee. It spent $1.3 million on ads on November 3 alone. In fact, while it spent about $5.3 million on the campaign since the page was created on July 24, around $3.3 million of that came in the seven days before the pause. 

The strategy 

One of the “get out the vote” ads that the Register to Vote Republican page was investing in and retargeting toward swing states on November 3.

“Get out the vote” ads are typical toward the end of a campaign, but the last-minute push to register Republicans dominated the political ads on Facebook in the last few days before the election. The ads created by “Register to Vote Republican,” which contain standard messages of mobilization, were generally activated on Facebook on October 25-26, squeezing in just before the deadline for new advertisements. Once those ads were approved and in Facebook’s system, money continued to pump into campaigns, and the ads were put through a constant set of tweaks and changes redirecting them toward a few battleground states. 

According to Facebook’s Ad Library, there were upwards of 50 adjustments to ads in the week running up to Election Day, with most changes happening on November 2 and 3. It’s difficult to parse exactly how much money and how many impressions were directed to each state, but it’s clear that the last-minute ads aimed at driving up turnout were heavily concentrated in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. 

This is a big change from previous Republican efforts to bolster turnout through digital advertising. In 2016, the party spent just under $3 million on digital ads aimed at turnout, compared with a total of $60 million in 2020. According to data from the Ad Observatory, a monitoring project from New York University, since October 12 Donald Trump outspent Joe Biden on Facebook ads that mentioned “vote” or “ballot” by over a million dollars.

The Biden campaign spent more money on Facebook ads intended to turn out voters in total during the campaign, but this spending was concentrated earlier in the cycle. Biden also heavily invested in Facebook ads during the last week of the election—spending more than the Trump campaign overall during that time period. But most of the adjustments made in the week before November 3 were focused on persuasive advertising in battleground states—such as messaging about economic issues—and not on ads to increase turnout. Democrats had focused on mail-in votes and early voting because of the pandemic, and they may have invested less in turnout ads toward the end because of the longer runway and the knowledge that voters had already cast their ballots before Election Day.

What it means

Facebook’s ban on new ads appears to be continuing indefinitely. Political ads are still not running on the platform at the time of writing, and it is unclear how long the policy will remain in place.

The data on ads up to Election Day is far from final, and it’s hard to draw direct conclusions from what we know. The real effectiveness of Facebook ads has been questioned many times. 

But what is clear is that historic turnout bolstered Republican and Democratic performance in the 2020 election, and that mail-in and early voting skewed heavily toward Democrats while same-day voting favored Republicans. The push to turn out the vote may have also affected results beyond the presidency, including down-ballot races for the House of Representatives—where the Democrats lost a number of seats—and the Senate, where the Republicans and Democrats are currently locked in a tie with the outcome of several races still to come.

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Biden calls for major investments into carbon removal tech

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President-elect Joe Biden wasted little time setting a new tone on climate change.

On Sunday, one day after major outlets called the presidential election for the former vice president, the Biden-Harris transition team released documents laying out the incoming administration’s early priorities, including a blueprint for “tackling the climate crisis.”

Most of the details were drawn directly from Biden’s sweeping campaign climate plan, which would dedicate $1.7 trillion to overhaul energy, transportation, agriculture, and other sectors. But the list of areas in which Biden hopes to make “far-reaching investments” includes at least one new term: negative-emissions technologies.

That phrase encompasses a number of approaches for drawing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. These can include carbon-sucking machines that companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering are developing; methods to speed up natural processes through which minerals capture and lock away carbon; and schemes that rely on plants to absorb carbon dioxide, then convert them into fuel sources and capture any resulting emissions (a process known as “bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration”).

Scientists say that removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year by midcentury will be essential for preventing very dangerous levels of global warming.

Biden’s earlier plan did mention reforestation and agricultural practices that could help to increase carbon in soil. The plan also highlighted the need to accelerate development and deployment of “carbon capture, use, and storage,” which generally refers to preventing the release of emissions from power plants and factories (though some took it to also mean negative emissions).

(Carbon capture, use, and storage wasn’t mentioned in the new Biden-Harris climate transition document.)

Other areas where the Biden-Harris administration wants to provide more research and development funding include:

  • Battery storage. Driving down costs and increasing the duration of energy storage technologies is crucial to make electric vehicles more affordable and competitive, and to allow fluctuating renewable sources like solar and wind to generate far more of the electricity on the grid.
  • Renewable hydrogen. Developing cheaper ways of producing clean forms of hydrogen could provide promising paths to cutting emissions from aviation, shipping, fertilizer production, and long-duration storage on the grid.
  • Advanced nuclear. A number of research groups and startups are developing new types of nuclear reactors that promise to be smaller, safer, and cheaper.  
  • Building materials. This could include developing new ways to produce industrial heat, which usually relies on burning fossil fuels, in order to clean up the production of steel, concrete, and other construction materials.

Policy observers believe that there could be opportunities to incorporate significant research and development funding for clean energy in upcoming economic stimulus packages, noting that such measures have bipartisan support. Indeed, Congress largely beat back the Trump administration’s repeated efforts to slash federal investments in these areas during the last four years.

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Taking action for the common good

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In 1979, a federally commissioned study led by meteorology pioneer and MIT professor Jule Charney helped alert the world to the processes driving global warming—at the time, a looming but not yet imminent threat. Today, climate change is no longer a challenge for some distant future; it is a present and accelerating crisis requiring swift, far-reaching action. There is room and reason for every one of us to get involved. 

To find out how others at MIT are working on this immensely complex problem and how you can participate too, I urge you to explore the MIT Climate Portal at climate.mit.edu. There you can also find our recent series of six symposia focused on the frontiers of climate science and technology. 

To inspire and enable the boldest work of our faculty on this great rolling threat to life on Earth as we know it, in July we announced the MIT Climate Grand Challenges. With this effort, led by Vice President for Research Maria Zuber and Associate Provost Richard Lester, we are seeking and expecting daring initiatives for sharpening our understanding of the impacts of climate change, combating its causes, and adapting constructively to its impacts.  

Principal investigators from across the Institute are now developing ambitious multidisciplinary ideas for tackling our climate emergency and designing the most effective levers for swift, large-scale change. We seek to accelerate projects that offer not only solutions but plans for rapid implementation—projects that are transformative, broad in scope, and large in ambition. In other words, the kind of work that brilliant people from around the world come to MIT to do.

I look forward to sharing details about the final selections. Up to five projects will be chosen, and MIT will then focus intensely on securing the funds for the work to succeed. 

Responding to the challenges of climate change will require structural transformations, serious technological advances, and significant changes in collective behavior—a tall order. Yet every emergency reveals that “impossible” things are actually doable; in response to covid-19, our society has demonstrated its ability to change more and faster than we ever imagined. There is value in having stretched our thinking about the possibilities of human adaptation, and in having proved that, at our best, we do have the capacity to take action together for the common good.

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Covid testing, MIT style

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covid test station at MIT medical

MELANIE GONICK

Seniors arriving on campus for the fall term headed to MIT’s custom-designed covid testing trailer, which lets caregivers swab noses using gloves protruding through height-adjustable panels. On August 31, MIT Medical administered over 2,700 tests—more than many states did that day—and topped that with a record 4,979 tests on September 14. Of the 22,176 tests given at MIT between August 17 and 31, only 10 (0.05%) were positive. The positive rate for September was 0.04% as of mid-month.

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Robotic surgery gives doctors new savvy

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Jeffrey Gum remembers his early-career surgeries with wonder. “We dissected a lot of muscle off the bone,” says Gum, an adult and pediatric spine surgeon at the Norton Leatherman Spine Center in Louisville, Kentucky. That resulted in “more blood loss than we’d prefer and big reconstructive surgeries.” With a traditional, open surgery, a patient could take six months to a year to recover.

At that time, in the early 2010s, Gum was skeptical about the value of robot-assisted surgery (RAS), which promised to widen access to the benefits of minimally invasive procedures—less bleeding and scarring and less recovery time in the hospital. “I felt the technology wasn’t advanced enough to be applied in spine surgery—the nerve roots, the spinal cord right there.”

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

But in 2017, Gum started to look at RAS, also known as robotic surgery, from a process point of view. He recognized how much in spine surgery is consistent and reproducible; RAS could help streamline his procedures while reducing waste. “This technology is really going to change the shape of our operating room,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of that.”

Using RAS, Gum says his procedures are less traumatic to the body, more precise, and more predictable, and his patients are getting up and walking much sooner after surgery, compared with traditional, open spine surgery.

Like Gum, surgeons around the world have come to realize that RAS offers many health-care advantages for the future—even though there hasn’t been widespead adoption. That may be changing, though, as advancements in technology and design are addressing effectiveness and raising the bar on system intelligence. And several studies have shown that frequent use of RAS for an expanding number of surgeries could boost its long-term value. Looking ahead, remote RAS—with a surgeon operating on a patient potentially thousands of miles away—could lead to wider access to high-quality surgery around the globe.

A revolution decades in the making

RAS is far from new. The first procedure was in 1985—a neurosurgical biopsy using a PUMA 560 robotic surgical arm. But the US Food and Drug Administration didn’t clear an RAS system for use until 2000. Two decades later, the market for RAS still hasn’t grown beyond the early adopter phase. Of the more than 50 million soft-tissue surgeries performed in 2018 globally, less than 2% were robot-assisted, according to Medtronic, a medical technology company. The United States has a higher adoption rate than elsewhere, but RAS still accounted for only 10% of all surgeries in 2018.

RAS has been held back because of the high costs (starting at about $1 million a unit) and a shortage of trained professionals. But with developments in converging technologies and methodologies, RAS is poised to mature, encouraging wider adoption. Stimuli include advances in assistive navigation, 3D imaging, artificial intelligence, big data, and of course robotics, which is becoming more sophisticated and less expensive. What’s more, as with all maturing technologies, the cost of RAS will likely come down as new, more efficient designs are developed, bringing it more in line with the typical cost of non-robotic minimally invasive surgery.

One thing that isn’t holding RAS back is patient interest. Perceptions of robotic surgery have been bolstered by movies and TV shows that represent the tools as more advanced than they are. That has fueled patients’ positive expectations. Matt Beane, assistant professor in the University of California Santa Barbara’s Technology Management Program, studied RAS implementation and training from 2014 to 2018. When interviewing patients, he noted frequent assumptions of “how capable these systems are, and how willing they are to be operated on by a machine.”

Some of the most important forces driving adoption are the proven benefits of RAS techniques. Though some RAS can be used for traditional open surgeries, it is generally associated with minimally invasive procedures. That means it involves smaller incisions than traditional open surgery, which results in less blood loss and pain, fewer complications such as infections, reduced procedure time, shorter hospital stays, and quicker recovery.

RAS benefits extend to the hospitals and surgeons. Using robotic systems in procedures such as orthopedic or endovascular surgeries reduces the number of radioscopic images required during an operation and can lead to less radiation exposure for the patient and the operating team. RAS standardizes surgical workflows, “democratizing excellence in these procedures and allowing more and more surgeons to do them,” explains David Simon, Medtronic’s vice president of research and development for cranial and spine technology.

Download the full report.

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How to Amplify Your Instagram Influencer Campaigns With Ads

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Do you partner with influencers on Instagram? Want to maximize your visibility to their audience? In this article, you’ll discover how to target an influencer’s following with a shared custom audience for Instagram ads. Why Run Your Own Instagram Ads for Influencer Campaigns? Collaborating with influencers on Instagram can bring fresh eyes to your product […]

The post How to Amplify Your Instagram Influencer Campaigns With Ads appeared first on Social Media Examiner | Social Media Marketing.

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